Hang is an issue play, but revealing the issue would be a spoiler. Whatever tension debbie tucker green’s script contains comes from figuring out the theme and then seeing how the characters deal with it.

In a nondescript room set some time in the near future, a cautious, watchful, Black woman (Sarah Afful) unnamed in the play but called Three in the script, is being guided through some important decision involving a consultation and paperwork by two unnamed bureaucrats (Zoé Doyle, who plays One, and Vladimir Alexis, Two).

The woman, clearly shaken up, at first refuses all niceties: tea, water (hot or cold), the offer to hang up her jacket. There’s much small talk – too much, in fact – about water coolers, air conditioning and office chairs.

Green, whose play Dirty Butterfly was produced here several years ago, wastes time by having characters awkwardly begin statements, pause and find another tack, and directors Philip Akin and Kimberley Rampersad can’t make these sequences anything but repetitive.

Doyle, her eyes and posture betraying her character’s conscience, is better at navigating this script than Alexis, who plays his part in one mode and has got diction issues. (The people behind me kept muttering that they couldn’t understand him.)

Afful has a magnetic presence and is intriguing, especially when she gets to do something, whether it’s describing her distraught family or perking up at news of One’s recent divorce.

But a lot of her performance is technical, her voice cascading up and down on cue or throbbing with calculated bursts of passion.

Steve Lucas’s cold, anonymous set doesn’t offer much to look at, and Christopher Stanton’s sound design offers few clues about the world we’re in.

Despite the important questions the play raises near the end – be prepared for some heated post-show discussions – the work feels like a 20-minute writing exercise (“Write about an issue without naming it!”) padded out to 75 minutes.

And the significance of Three’s race (she’s identified as Black in the script) isn’t fully explored.